From Noisy Retrieval to Decision Evidence: Silver Evidence Demonstrations for In-Context Learning

arXiv:2610.32128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RAG and retrieval-augmented few-shot ICL can struggle when decision-relevant evidence is buried in long, noisy context. Retrieved passages and demonstrations may contain redundant or distracting information. Although expert-labeled development examples may identify the text supporting each decision, these annotations are typically used only as answer-side rationales rather than as supervision for filtering noisy retrieval. We propose silver-evidence demonstrations, which replace raw retrieved passages in ICL examples with generated, target-conditioned evidence summaries. For each labeled development example, an LLM generates silver evidence without access to the expert label or gold evidence; this evidence is then paired with the expert label